Making a Marking Knife

I was wading through my old woodworking bookmarks, and stumbled across this great guide to making a marking knife. It looked like a fairly easy project, and cheap! Looks like I can take that Japanese marking knife off my wish list. So here we go:
The blade is taken from a jigsaw blade, and it didn’t take too long to file off the teeth:
For the handle, I took a 6” section of kempas scrap that I had lying around. Incidentally, you can see on the bench that I filed the ...

Last week I blogged about making a marking knife from scratch. I had gotten as far as getting a good start on the handle and filing the blade to a point.
Yesterday, I was going to file a bevel onto the blade, hone it, and then work on getting in mounted in the handle. I didn’t quite get that far.
Do you know how hard it is to hand-file bevels onto a spear-pointed knife, so that both sides are even? I found myself overdoing one side, then the other. I made adjustments to the angle ...

Still working on the marking knife. Now I need to drill a small (3/32”) hole for the tang of the blade. Got the bit, but it’s too small for the chuck of my bit brace. I decided to “mount” the bit inside a dowel, and either put the dowel in the bit brace, or just twist the “dowel drill” by hand.
First, I hammered a nail into the dowel, since it was easier than trying to twist the drill bit into the wood by hand. I wasn’t sure if it would split the d...

So I had a good couple days in the shop before I packed it all up the other day. Besides doing the cushion frame for my friend, I did a lot of work on my marking knife. The first task was to get the blade satisfactory. In the end, I did this by cutting a 30(ish)-degree bevel on a piece of scrap, and then filed the bevels of the blade along that angle. It’s not perfect, but it’s pretty good. I then honed the blade on my waterstones, which was a real bear with no honing jig. By the ...